Sure we'd like to win. But we know we'll have fun." -- chef Aaron Burgau of Patois

Hogs for the Cause is the type of event that sparks long conversations about the art of cooking pork, slow and low, with equal parts smoke and love, until the meat hits that perfect sweet spot of tenderness.

But ask the Hogs competitors to get down to the nitty-gritty – dry rub? wet marinade? mesquite wood? – and suddenly they clam up.

“I can’t give away my secrets,” said Howard Conyers, a South Carolina native, first-time Hogs competitor, captain of the CarolinaQNola team, and a NASA engineer -- in other words, an actual rocket scientist.

“We’ve got a special dish we’re working on, but we can’t talk about it,” said Kris Martinez of team Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, referring to its entry in the catch-all “Porkpourri” category.

“I cannot even give you a hint,” said Chris Puckett, a businessman, owner of the Yogurtland frozen yogurt franchise in Louisiana, and captain of the Boar’s Nest team, also referring to his team's "Porkpourri" entry.

The Boar’s Nest, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and CarolinaQNola are three of the more than 80 teams that will fill City Park this Friday night and Saturday with wood smoke, smack talk and lovingly prepared pork products.

The teams take the twin challenges – barbecue and big-dollar fundraising – seriously.

HOGS FOR THE CAUSE

A barbecue competition and festival to raise money for families coping with pediatric brain cancer.

Friday, March 22: A new Friday Night Tailgate Experience will open the gates of City Park's Festival Grounds from 4 to 11 p.m. The public will be allowed to mingle with the teams as they cook and hold fundraising parties. Drinks and food will be sold. Also on Friday night, the Fatback Collective, an A-team of star chefs, will cook for the new Southern Asado gala dinner, a meal in the style of Argentine meat feasts.

Saturday, March 23, 11 a.m.: Professional chefs and backyard barbecue enthusiasts vie for bragging rights and pig-topped trophies in the Ben Sarrat Jr. "High on the Hog" Cookoff. Teams sell samples of their dishes to the public. There also will be live music on two stages.

Where: City Park Festival Grounds.

Cost: Friday Night Tailgate Experience tickets are $5; the Southern Asado gala dinner tickets are $300, and general admission for the barbecue festival and cookoff are $15 in advance and $20 at the gate. Details: Hogs for the Cause.

The Boar’s Nest has been working on its plans, its booth and its pork preparations for months. Its sauce is vinegar-based. Its rubs, “proprietary,” Puckett said.

The team's smoker is a five-foot square box, trailer-based, with two doors and six racks. It’ll hold a thousand pounds of meat at one time. “It’s big, ugly, brown, but boy will it smoke,” he said.

“We keep it at a storage center on the West Bank because my wife doesn’t want it anywhere near the house.”

The Boar’s Nest is a new name for the team, which previously cooked under the Squeal Bar-B-Q banner. This year, the Squeal restaurant folks have a separate team, and the Boar’s Nest is comprised of 15 people -- 16 if you count Puckett’s 8-year-old son -- and they're all “non-professionals,” Puckett said.

By that, he means they’re not chefs. Calling these guys barbecue amateurs would be a gross misuse of the term.

“I’m from North Carolina, I love barbecue, it’s religion,” he says.

The team will compete in every Hogs category: whole hog, ribs, pork butt/shoulder, sauce and “porkpourri,” the catch-all that encompasses pretty much anything involving pig products conceived on a grill.

Beyond barbecue, there’s also a fight for fundraising champion. The Boar’s Nest is a heavyweight contender, on track to raise more than $40,000. The cause is dear to Puckett, whose mother died from brain cancer. "It completely changed who I am," he said.

The Boar's Nest has rounded up more than a dozen sponsors, including Truebridge Foods, which provided all its pork, and McIlhenny Co., which provided wooden staves from Tabasco barrels for smoking.

The team also has a not-so-secret fundraising weapon: a dunking booth.

Another not-so-secret weapon: Puckett is a 610 Stomper. Several of his blue-shorts-wearing buddies may be hanging around. Dancing may ensue.

Building a barbecue community

It’s often said that New Orleans is not barbecue country, that, depending on your persuasion, Memphis or Kansas City, Texas or the Carolinas are the lands that have a lock on the best ways to slow cook meat over heat. Those places have long tradition on their side.

But after chatting with the Hogs competitors, you get a sense that New Orleans, at least from a passion standpoint, isn’t so far removed from the barbecue South.

'Our rig is called the Death Star; we could probably cook well over 1,000 pounds of meat on it at one time. Itâs a beauty to behold,' said Drew Herrington, captain of the Fleur de Que team.Michael DeMocker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Hogs for the Cause, founded in 2008 by longtime friends and Jesuit High School grads Becker Hall and Rene Louapre, deserves some credit for that.

The event started out small, with just a desire to roast a pig in the park with friends. Hall and Louapre added the charitable element after meeting Ben Sarrat Jr., a 4-year-old with an incurable brain tumor.

In the five years since that first cookout at The Fly in Audubon Park, Hogs has ballooned into a barbecue bacchanalia. This year, more than 80 teams will compete, up from 58 last year.

In 2012, attendance swelled to 12,000 people. Monsoon rains doused City Park before the event, turning the set-up into a soupy mess of knee-deep mud. In the end, the event still raised thousands for charity.

This year, the whole shebang moves to City Park’s brand new Festival Grounds. Even if it rains, it shouldn’t turn into a pigsty.

“It drains,” said Laura Filipek, an architect with Torre Design Consortium, the company that designed the festival grounds. “And it has a mile walking path going around the whole thing.”

The festival grounds were a personal as well as professional project for Filipek. She’s a member of Sweet Swine O' Mine, an all-women Hogs team and proud champion of the sauce category for 2011.

Sweet Swine used to have a fairly modest set-up. The first few years, they were out there with six Weber grills.

This year, they’ve upped their game. “We had one of our teammate’s husband make a smoker using parts from an aquarium pet shop,” she said. “We’re excited to see how we can utilize chemistry and the convection of heat and moisture.”

Barbecue cooking equipment, as one would assume, is a popular topic in the Hogs community. Smokers, pits and custom-rigs are often discussed with the fawning praise and sense of awe reserved for fancy sports cars and fast pleasure boats.

“Our rig is called the Death Star; we could probably cook well over 1,000 pounds of meat on it at one time. It’s a beauty to behold,” said Drew Herrington, captain of the Fleur de Que team.

The rig has been parked outside of a team member's house. “We’ve been able to appease most of the neighbors by handing out barbecue,” he said.

This will be Fleur de Que’s fourth year as a Hogs competitor. “We started out with just a couple of homemade smokers and three or four guys, and now we have several members and huge professional cooking gear,” Herrington said.

On the way to his wedding last year, Joe Vaccaro, center back with champagne bottle, and his groomsmen made a stop at Hogs for the Cause before heading to the church. The guys had previously competed in the event, as Team Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but had to take last year off for the wedding. "We joked with his wife that we were still going to Hogs, even though it was their wedding day," said teammate Kris Martinez. "The groom put some barbecue sauce on his shirt, and showed it to her on the altar." This year, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon will be back, competing and cooking up some sort of anniversary tribute to the bride and groom.Courtesy of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

“We keep looking at each other and saying, ‘At some point we’ve got to slow down.’ But this event, for people who love barbecue, I put it right up there with Jazz Fest.”

Herrington is no stranger to heavy equipment. He owns New Line Environmental Systems, a coastal restoration and erosion control company. He was the guy who came to the rescue last year when the torrential downpours threatened to turn the barbecue cook-off into a swamp fest.

Weather presents a particular challenge for an event like this. You can’t just postpone when your competitors have been marinating and prepping thousands of pounds of pork.

That sort of all-in spirit is a big part of the Hogs ethos. Teams get on conference calls to discuss rules, plan logistics and share leads on everything from discount truck rentals to water supplies. Emails fly when someone has a tip to share or a smoker to lend.

“It’s a great collaborative effort to pull this off,” Herrington said. “But as soon as the event starts, the gloves come off. It’s a bare knuckle brawl to win the trophies.”

A sleepover in the park

This year, Hogs for the Cause has expanded, opening the gates on Friday night to let the public participate in one of the most loved elements of the Hogs experience: the overnight cookout that turns into a grown-up sleepover.

Teams camp out, tending their smokers. As the sun sets, fires smolder in the pits. The mingled scent of grilled pork and wood smoke begins to permeate the park. There’s camaraderie. There’s carousing. There are chefs in pajamas.

The public can join the festivities from 4 to 11 p.m., for a $5 entrance fee. Several of the teams are using the Friday night to add to their fundraising totals.

The Boar’s Nest, for example, is hosting a party with food by The Delachaise and all-you-can-drink beer for $20 per person. They set up a Facebook page with details on how to get tickets.

Another addition to the lineup this year is a Friday night Southern Asado dinner. Members of the Fatback Collective – a culinary A-team of star chefs that includes Donald Link, Stephen Stryjewski, Ryan Prewitt, Sean Brock and Ashley Christensen, among others – will cook whole animals over open fire in the style of Argentine meat feasts. The $300-per-person event will include passed hors d’oeuvres, a seafood bar, charcuterie plates, roasted meats and cocktails by Neal Bodenheimer of Cure.

Professional chefs also field teams for the daytime competition. They compete head to head – or rather pork butt to pork shoulder – with teams led by passion-driven backyard grillers.

Chef Aaron Burgau of Patois restaurant fields a team with chefs Justin Devillier of La Petite Grocery, Nathanial Zimet of Boucherie, Bart Bell of Crescent Pie and Sausage Co. and Daniel Esses of Three Muses. The only non-chef on their roster is Billy Ceravolo, a New Orleans police officer.

This year, they’re calling themselves Stand Up and Snout. “We plan to keep changing the name each year until we win,” Burgau said.

Beyond the competition, Burgau and other chefs look at Hogs as a rare opportunity to hang out with their colleagues, something that’s hard to do when you’re running busy restaurants.

“Last year, on Friday we spent the night in the park. Neal Bodenheimer brought scotch. We hung out. Almost every chef in the city is there,” Burgau said. “Sure we’d like to win. But we know we’ll have fun.”

Correction:An earlier version of this story noted that Mignon Faget designed barbecue belt buckles for the The Boar’s Nest team for Hogs for the Cause. The belt buckles were designed in the same facility where Faget’s jewelry is cast, but she did not design the piece.